Samsung will make the Snapdragon 820 for Qualcomm

Alexey Zhukov

10:34, January 15, 2016

Samsung has made it a habit of announcing the mass production of its new flagship mobile chip, the chip that usually ends up making its debut with the company’s new Galaxy S flagship, and it’s sticking to this tradition in 2016 as well. Ahead of MWC 2016 where it’s likely going to unveil the Galaxy S7, Samsung today confirmed that it has started mass production of the Exynos 8 Octa processor on its second-generation 14nm FinFET process. It also confirmed that it’s going to make the Snapdragon 820 processor for Qualcomm on this process as well.

The Exynos 7 Octa chip from Samsung was the industry’s first chip to be manufactured on the 14nm FinFET logic process, Samsung mentioned in its announcement that this is the second-generation of that process, and through improvements in transistor structure and optimizations the chips provide about 15 percent gain in performance and a similar reduction in power consumption.

Samsung won’t just be using this new advanced manufacturing process for its own chips, it has Qualcomm as a client. Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 820 chip, which will power many flagship smartphones this year possibly including some variants of the Galaxy S7, will be manufactured by Samsung on its second-generation FinFET process.

This really came as a surprise to many because Qualcomm had confirmed that the Snapdragon 820 would use a 14nm FinFET chip, it didn’t quite say who would manufacture it, and now the confirmation comes straight from Samsung itself. The company says that devices powered by the Snapdragon 820 will arrive in the first half of this year.